Christine Itwaru: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's interesting. That was the summer of product ops. What happened there? Why was there a summer of product ops? Why was everyone starting to get excited and creating product ops teams? Yeah, I'll dive in. The customers started to come up and we started to feel it a bit more and I felt like there was this huge need for a voice of customer management and synthesis of both this qualitative and quantitative data as a theme that I saw arising across our customer base or even just folks that were reaching out about this role as they saw Pendo was putting it down. There was a lot of pain around internal alignment in general, transparency to stakeholders up across your revenue team members. Then for a lot of people during this time, growth was a massive propeller of the need for product ops. I remember just sitting here in this office and getting these random... Every industry almost was like, "Yeah, I'm thinking about doing this and I really need to do this, the pandemic, blah, blah, blah." Because it was growth during the pandemic, especially within industries such as home furnishings and making their living space a whole lot better. All of a sudden, we started to see that rise, but we were all experiencing this massive amount of growth across some of these startups and really rapidly growing companies. We're also moving more towards these product-led tactics, product-led growth. All of these things I feel like made this perfect storm for product operations to come in and start calming things down. I personally believe there's this natural evolution that happens at any mature function when it starts to grow in an industry and across an organization. So, think about marketing or sales. This just started to happen with product managers. For me, I was sitting there going, "Well, you can appoint a PM to liaise with other ops teams and the business, but at what risk?" Their product portfolio, the growth and adoption of their product, all these goals that they have to hit today in order to build a better tomorrow for their customers. So, I feel like that was the moment to say, "Okay, how do we give them the structure that they needed to thrive?" Because the CPO is in charge of so much more than product people have historically been in charge of, right? I'll probably talk about Marty Cagan several times here. I really do admire and respect him, and I think one of the things that he always talks about is future teams versus high performing teams and focusing on outcomes. CPOs went from deliver, deliver, deliver to really increased business metrics or just help drive the bottom line versus just really look at the product. You really have to figure out what that means for the product team at large. Got it. So, the way to think about this role, because I imagine most people haven't ever had a product ops person in their company is there's a slice of the PM role that companies are finding is valuable to put on a different person that has different skillsets that can take this endless load that PMs have. PMs have so many things to do and their job is so full of responsibilities that there's a sliver of stuff that a product ops person can take off. I'd be curious too and feel free to comment on that, but I'm also curious, you mentioned a few specific things that the product ops folks do. It'd be cool to just go through a bullet list of just those sorts of things, like you said, responsible for voice of the customer, pieces, alignment across stakeholders, whatever. If you could just go through some of those, that makes it really concrete I think for people to understand wow, this person that could have someone do all these for me, that'd be amazing.…

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